From Slavery to Freedom
- liobjca
- 12 hours ago
- 2 min read
By Zanna Linskaia
Springtime comes with the annual Jewish holiday of Passover, also called the Holiday of Spring or Chag Ha’aviv. Everyone knows that during Passover we eat matzah and keep traditions with the Seder ceremony - reading Haggadah, drinking 4 cups of wine and citing 10 plagues. But what exactly is Passover celebrating?
In short, it’s the Exodus of Jews from Egypt and their 40-year journey to the land of Israel. However, throughout Jewish history there have been multiple exoduses and expulsions - an incomplete list of over 1030 in human history is noted by Wikipedia. As long as the Jewish nation has existed, it has been persecuted and forced to wander from land to land, starting with slavery in Egypt, to the destruction of the 1st and 2nd Temples in Jerusalem, to the Crusades, the pogroms in Russia, the Holocaust, and modern-day anti-Semitism in pro-Palestinian protests and rallies.
Every nation has the most influential event in their history - the French Revolution, Muhammad's revelations, the end of the Roman Empire, or the former USSR... For Jews, Passover remains a significant event, symbolizing freedom and redemption. The Torah describes the Exodus from Egypt “of 600,000 men, besides women and children, livestock, both flocks and herds”. Perhaps, there were 2 million Israelites in all.
The Exodus transformed the Jewish people and their ethics. The Ten Commandments open with the words “I am the Lord, your God, who took you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage”. Having no other God means no other forms of divinity and demands absolute commitment. It became a postulate for other confessions as well. The secret of the impact of the Exodus from Egypt is that it does not present itself as an ancient history, a one-time event. As free people relive the Exodus, it turns memory into a moral aspect. Commemorating the Exodus from Egypt during Passover is the most important moment in Jewish history - the evolution from Slavery to Freedom.
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